Research talk:Increasing article coverage/Tool

The feedback for the tool goes here.

Feedback from Jonathan edit

1.add a 'give us feedback' button. It's fine if it just links to a talkpage.

2. Change "Articles Similar To (optional)". To "Enter an article title below to find similar articles to translate."

3. Change "Recommend" button label to "Get recommendations". Make the button blue (progressive): http://tools.wmflabs.org/styleguide/desktop/section-2.html#section-2.1

4. Change "Seed article" to "article title".

5. Don't pre-populate the 'To' field with a particular target language. Leave it blank until the user makes their selection. Maybe make the default option "select language" in grey text.

6. Not sure it makes sense to present the user with a list of recommendations when they first visit the page. I found myself wondering what those articles were, given that I had yet to specify my target language (I don't know Catalan >_<). Perhaps wait until the user has specified their target language before generating the first set of recommendations.

7. Instead of using "Articles Recommended for Translation" as the page title, make it the title of the section of the page that contains articles recommended for translation. Place it directly above the article list. This makes it clearer to the user what that list contains.

7.1. if it's not too hard, you might want to also add a sub-title that says something like "These articles from [source wiki] can be translated into [target wiki]"

8. Put the actual page title in the upper left of the menu bar. Maybe call it something like "Article recommendations" or "Recommender".

9. Add a "refresh" button that generates 10 new recommendations based on the current criteria. Call it "Load more recommendations" or "View more recommendations". Not sure how easy/hard this is, but it will be really useful for testing: we want the users to be able to explore as freely as possible so that we can get a better sense of what they want/need out of the tool. Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 23:49, 20 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Ignore titles with redirects edit

The first few examples I clicked on to try translating seemed unlikely that English would be missing them... for example, I selected Bomba atomica (atomic bomb) on Italian Wikipedia - which was recommended to me. Of course, there is an article about this on English Wikipedia, but en:Atomic bomb is actually a redirect to en:Nuclear weapon where several typologies (including the atomic bomb) are discussed in the one article. This difference in the way that different languages scope their merging and separating of similar topics is a perpetual issue in deciding which Wikidata item to connect things to, and can't be solved with a neat 1-to-1 solution. In the mean time however... would it be possible to add a check for whether the output of a machine-translation for the article title already exists as an article or redirect on the destination language? And if so, ignore it as a suggestion? Wittylama (talk) 14:19, 29 April 2016 (UTC)Reply

Grammar edit

Some of the tool's documentation text seems to have been written by someone who didn't pass 7th grade. Example:

  • "GapFinder helps you discover articles that exist one language but are missing another."

That's all I'll share for now. - Thekohser (talk) 11:48, 30 April 2016 (UTC)Reply

Or English is not their native language. Give them a break! Bennylin 03:55, 3 May 2016 (UTC)Reply
Or that we just missed it, or both, or all.   Thanks for pointing it out, Thekohser. I filed a ticket (T137957) for us to fix this. Thanks, Bennylin for encouraging a more friendly space, too. --LZia (WMF) (talk) 11:46, 16 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
You're welcome :). Bennylin 16:50, 19 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
You're also welcome, from me. ;-) - Thekohser (talk) 11:55, 20 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

Please fix zh-yue, zh-min-nan and zh-classical edit

zh-yue, zh-min-nan and zh-classical Wikipedia still have no timetable to be moved to yue, nan and lzh, but the tool is already using yue, nan and lzh, so the result does not display normally. --Monsolo15 (talk) 12:32, 2 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

Hi Monsolo15. Thanks for flagging this. We have filed a task to fix this. You can follow it at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T138649

Feedback from Benny edit

  1. The "Search" field was not visible. I missed it at my first visit, and left the site thinking it still needs to be worked out some more, until a friend pointed out that there's a search field, then I got back and had my "Aha!" moment
  2. With "Search", I can think of several potential, one is searching within a category (and all of its subcategories) what articles are missing in the target language (Some statistics would also help). I tried searching "Category:Indonesia", and the result is not what I expected
  3. Search in a specific list (for example, list of Vital articles) for missing articles in target language would be awesome (visualization-wise). I tried searching "Wikipedia:Vital articles", and the result is also unexpected
  4. Remember my last language pair, so if I refresh or revisit the page, I don't have to enter the language pair everytime. Either use cookie, or via url (like Google Translate)
  5. Or, a button to easily refresh recommendations, so I don't have to refresh the page each time.

All in all, from my first try, it seems visually appealing to see the images, and not just the [red links] titles of missing articles, and give more incentives for translators to use the ContentTranslation tool. Bennylin 04:25, 3 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

Hi Bennylin. Thanks for the input. Here are some responses:

  1. We have made some changes to the search bar to make it more discoverable. I'd say it can still become more dominant. We can even test with removing random recommendations altogether so the search becomes even more prominent (that change can also put more control in the hands of the user, as opposed to showing the user popular but still random articles.)
  2. Yes. We are planning to move the API behind this service to production, and filtering by lists or categories is something we can do much more easily in the production environment. We should do that.
  3. I answered this above.
  4. Great point re remembering the last language pair. We made a task to get to it: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T135208
  5. Would a refresh choice be more desirable or a "show more" at the bottom of the page?

Thanks again for your input and trying the tool. --LZia (WMF) (talk) 23:07, 11 July 2016 (UTC)Reply

Great. Thanks for the changes. Regarding your last question, I would say yes. Bennylin 02:55, 12 August 2016 (UTC)Reply

Relevance edit

If I see well, the tool ranks articles based on number of views in the source language wikipedia. However, relevance can differ a lot between languages. Wouldn't it be possible to take into account the interests of people using the target language? E.g. to rank taking into account the number of views from computers/browsers set with the target language? (E.g. for translations en->hu not to rank based on all views of the en article, but its views from computers/browsers with hu as the language)? In this way the results would have more relevance for the people using the target language. --89.134.173.99 18:45, 18 May 2016 (UTC) --Antissimo (talk) 18:46, 18 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

Hi Antissimo. This is a good idea. We also have tried in the past to take into account the number of other languages in which the article already exists in. This is usually a strong signal, as if many languages have the article, probably the specific language it's missing in should have it, too. Going beyond just the pageview count in source is a goal. --LZia (WMF) (talk) 23:09, 11 July 2016 (UTC)Reply

A bug edit

Gapfinder bug - I chose Hindi as source and English as target and found several articles displayed but when I click them they run into trouble with no page to display. Browser independent I presume but I use a recent Firefox. Shyamal (talk) 10:00, 1 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

I have the same bug. Probably, because of russian language of interface. How can I switch it to English? --Alex Blokha (talk) 12:02, 31 May 2017 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for reporting. The issue has been captured in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193575 and it has been fixed. Bmansurov (WMF) (talk) 19:37, 2 May 2018 (UTC)Reply

Adding a location filter edit

I think this tool will serve better if it has another filter by number of views from a country or a region if that is possible. That way if some one is looking for articles to create in a particular language that is missing then they could also find the relevant articles according to their region. That way it is a better match on articles to be created. This offcourse could be an additional filter not necessarily embedded in the main logic. --Chinmayisk (talk) 06:20, 3 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the suggestion. It's been captured in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193577.

Please add an option to export the suggested articles edit

After running some queries, I notice that in some cases, the articles exist but are not linked across languages. Having an export option for these articles allows a lot of flexibility. For example, you could plug the results to another tool (say Petscan) and further edit the Wikidata items for the pages.

Please consider adding such an option to export the results.

Soni (talk) 06:17, 7 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the suggestion. It's been captured in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193576. Bmansurov (WMF) (talk) 21:56, 1 May 2018 (UTC)Reply

Broken links edit

For some of the articles, the links are broken. For example, I tried using Gapfinder for Hindi -> English. A number of the top articles had malformed links in the Hindi wikipedia link (when I tried to follow it)

Soni (talk) 06:49, 7 September 2017 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for reporting. The issue has been captured in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193575 and it has been fixed. Bmansurov (WMF) (talk) 21:53, 1 May 2018 (UTC)Reply

Feature suggestion edit

Unfortunately, this tool does not provide the option to search in all languages ​​at once, please add this option as soon as possible and inform me..Mohmad Abdul sahib 19:21, 22 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Add more languages edit

Hi Admin.

Please add Tyap (kcg) language as one of the languages of GapFinder. This is to enable us find gaps in the Tyap Wikipedia.

Thanks and regards, Kambai Akau (talk) 14:40, 8 October 2023 (UTC)Reply

@Kambai Akau thanks for reporting this. I wanted to acknowledge this while I think about next steps. The heart of the problem is that we have not been maintaining GapFinder actively and so the list of languages that it will support is based on when it was last restarted (some time ago at this point). I'm semi-hesitant to restart it and refresh that list because I'm not sure that this wouldn't cause some larger problem that brings down the whole system. I'll discuss with some other folks what we can do, but, in the meantime, I'd suggest going directly to Content Translation's recommendation interface, which is supported by the same logic: https://kcg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wat_khwo:ContentTranslation Isaac (WMF) (talk) 19:14, 10 October 2023 (UTC)Reply
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